The Labour Market Impact of Immigration in Three Sub-Saharan African Economies
- PDF / 2,953,325 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 43 Downloads / 138 Views
The Labour Market Impact of Immigration in Three Sub-Saharan African Economies Theo Sparreboom 1
& Jesse
Mertens 1 & Sandra Berger 1
# Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This paper estimates the effects of immigration on labour market outcomes of the native-born based on the skill cell approach pioneered by Borjas (QJE 118:1335–137, 2003). Three economies are included in the first cross-country analysis of the labour market effects of immigration in Sub-Saharan Africa based on this approach—Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa. We find limited effects of immigration on native-born labour market outcomes in these three countries, and results are sensitive to specifications and groups under consideration. Overall, an unfavourable effect on native-born labour market outcomes is more likely for workers with lower levels of education. In accordance with the literature, we find that the complementarity of workers as captured by an occupational dissimilarity index helps explain the results in some countries, but not in all. Keywords Labour market . Migration . Employment . Human capital
Introduction Since the early 1990s, the relation between migration and development has risen steadily on international agendas, in part due to increasing numbers of international migrants. The stock of international migrants increased from 173 million in 2000 to 258 million in 2017,1 which implies an average annual growth rate of 2.4%. In Africa, the growth rate was considerably faster at 3.1%, while the number of international migrants
1 In this paper, and in line with United Nations (2017), an international migrant is defined as a foreign-born person.
The responsibility for opinions expressed in this paper rests solely with the authors, and does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO or any other agency.
* Theo Sparreboom [email protected]
1
International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland
Sparreboom T. et al.
reached almost 25 million in 2017. South Africa featured globally among the 20 countries with the largest number of migrants in this year (United Nations 2017). Despite the significant rise in the number of migrants in Africa, the focus of much migration research has been by and large on emigration from the continent to highincome countries. Thus, the potential impact of migration to developing countries as countries of destination has remained largely overlooked. Given the differences in labour markets and other economic and institutional features in low- and middleincome countries, this impact may potentially be very different in comparison to high-income countries. This paper looks into the labour market effects of immigration in three African countries—Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa, which are classified as lower middle income, low income, and upper middle income, respectively (World Bank 2017). The method that has been applied is based on the grouping of the native-born and migrants according to their education and experience. This method was pioneered by Borjas (2003) in the USA and deviates sharply from an earlier
Data Loading...
